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Optimizing Your Ecommerce Content for Your Customers

It can’t be stressed enough how ecommerce sites should offer unique, useful content that is friendly to both humans and search engines. For the most part, excellently written content can help influence website visitors to complete a transaction. Plus, it also helps your website become relevant and competitive in the search engine pages for certain terms or keywords.

Because of these websites’ complex structure and the intense competition against other online retailers offering the same products, optimizing your ecommerce content better for customers doesn’t only entail fixing the body or the actual content that users can read. It also involves a lot of work in terms of structure, presentation, and keyword research. In the first place, it is the search engines that brings visitors to your site, so you have to work on making your site readable to machines as well.

Now, how can you ensure that your ecommerce site is filled with content that is helpful to both your customers and search engines?

Below are some proven ways on how you can use the precious real estate available for content on your website.

Match the users’ search intent when targeting keywords

If you sell desk phones online, keywords like “office phone” or “business phones” may seem like excellent keywords to highlight in your content since a lot of people use these as search terms every month. But you can’t easily tell the user’s real intent there. Yes, searchers might be looking to buy phone units, but they can also be looking for simple information – maybe they’re looking for a provider who can deliver business phone services or maybe they just don’t know how an office phone is supposed to look like.

Therefore, you need to target queries that are transactional. Go after keywords that explicitly fulfill the user’s intent such as (still using the example above), “buy office phones.” Adding terms like “buy,” “shop,” or “compare” to the important keywords for your business can lead you to more favorable results. And by doing so, you’re only attracting the kind of visitors you really want – those who intend to make a purchase.

Create unique product descriptions

Search engines frown at product descriptions or specifications that are lifted directly from online brochures or manufacturer’s websites. Relying on such text might pose a threat to your website since there’s a probability that crawlers or algorithms will treat them as duplicate content, which runs you the risk of not being listed in the results pages at all.

But how about if you have thousands of different items to sell? There’s no way to generate unique content for each product, for sure. It will probably even take you a year to finish writing descriptions for just one category.

Don’t even think about lifting product descriptions from another site and don’t spend a fortune on outsourcing content writers. Actually, you can start by selecting products you want prioritized and then creating unique copy around them. These may be category pages or specific product pages that are valuable to your business. These are the things that you want to focus on; you want them to be visible in the search results.

Meantime, you can tag the product pages that are not in your current list with the “noindex, nofollow” attribute. Then, when you find the time to create unique content for these pages, that’s when you can gradually remove the tags on each page so that search engines may be able to crawl them, too.

Go beyond the usual product description

Supporting your existing content with creative, engaging content that may or may not be found within your website can give your brand some extra mileage. It will make your otherwise sales-y ecommerce site a more human touch. Consumers are said to demand a personal relationship from the brands they trust.

So how can you create content beyond your usual ecommerce pages? Consider the following:

Create a blog, and fill it with content that site visitors will find useful

Share news about the brands you carry

Talk about upcoming products in your posts

Include tips from industry experts or influencers

Feature outstanding items or bestsellers from your product line

Create how-tos, ideally in the form of videos, to teach buyers how to use your products

Actively engage on social media for inquiries or concerns

Gather testimonials, or conduct case studies to boost brand trust

Good engagement signals can help you increase your visibility online. If customers care about your online presence, then you can at least say there’s a huge probability that you’re just one step closer to completing that next transaction.

While everything starts with creating great, compelling content and following best practices in website creation, it’s also important for these sites to be readable to search engine bots, because they’re usually what brings customers to your website.

About the Author(s)

Klaris Chua is a digital content marketer at RingCentral who has written many pieces on startups and small business communications.